Ever wonder why a river with an average depth of three feet still drowned the army that tried to cross it? Right. Because averages are just that – averages. They don’t accommodate the peaks and valleys of a fragmented landscape. Now consider lead scoring, the mechanism that lets you determine whether a lead is ready to go to sales or whether it needs more nurturing. If you only have one scoring system – that doesn’t distinguish between region or product family for example – you can’t effectively navigate your buying landscape. You can miss peril and opportunity a­like in differences of offerings, go-to-market strategies and more. One size doesn’t fit all.

Can someone who is reading this give me the ideal way of segmentation in email marketing? Anyone? Now we can start an endless conversation about best practices, but essentially it always comes back to the relevance of your message in the dialogues with your target groups. Some marketers don’t use segmentation. “Everyone likes to listen to everything” is their motto. Too bad, that is not working.

Luckily a lot of clever marketers do segment in different ways. I say luckily because relationship building in email marketing is fundamental in email marketing nowadays. Capturing information via relevant messages by creating valuable dialogues which create respect between the brand and the customer. It is not only about capturing and collecting as much data as possible, but also about using it in the right way. Segmenting is a way of working intelligently with your data in order to optimize your relationship and of course your return on investment.

Before starting ask yourself, “What am I trying to accomplish with this email campaign?” Some businesses launch a campaign to build their brand or announce their presence (Traffic Building); others aim to generate leads (Lead Generation) and orders (Sales Generation). This is the first and most important step in a Direct Marketing campaign as all the subsequent steps are built around achieving this objective. Without a clear objective it is impossible to determine success.

Knowledge is power, and that extends to the customer information in youreCRM systems and other databases. Leveraging that data to extend relevant cross- and up-sell offers into your transactional email only makes sense. And that’s only one of the benefits.

It all started with a simple tweet “@Kvanbeeck is wondering if he will get an upgrade for his wife’s 30th birthday @ #Westin #Venice tomorrow.” 30 minutes later I got a new follower @Starwoodbuzz and a kind tweet reply “Hi Kenny. We’ve informed the hotel and they’ll do their best. Have a fantastic stay and happy birthday to your wife!”

When people receive an email, it is just a matter of seconds to decide which emails they are going to read. Email marketing can be very effective and the open rate can be very high, if it is done correctly.

1. The most important thing to pay attention to is the “subject-line”. After all, the purpose of the subject line is to intrigue readers into opening the email.2. Success also depends of the “from-line”.3. Finally one should find the best timing to send the email.

You can get different results from your email newsletter depending on what day and time you send them.Guesswork, testing different times/days and carefully monitoring your email stats is normally the best way to find out but here is a great shortcut for you… Why not use Twitter as a new input.